Carolina chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) calling behavior in response to threats and in flight: Flockmate familiarity matters.

Abstract

Signalers can vary their vocal behavior, depending on the presence or absence of conspecific group members, and on the composition of the group. Here we asked whether Carolina chickadee () signalers varied their vocal behavior, depending on whether they were in the presence of familiar or unfamiliar flockmates. We sorted 32 Carolina chickadees into 4 groups with 4 familiar birds each and 4 groups with 4 unfamiliar birds each and recorded their behavior in seminatural aviary settings. We presented the familiar and unfamiliar aviary groups with a variety of stimuli ranging in level of threat and assessed birds' calling behavior in these contexts. Birds housed with familiar flockmates called sooner in threatening stimulus presentations compared with birds housed with unfamiliar flockmates. Call rates and note compositions of calls produced did not differ for the 2 types of flock. Upon release from the captive aviaries, birds from familiar flocks were also more likely to call in flight than were birds from unfamiliar aviaries. These findings suggest that chickadees vary their calling behavior as a function of experience with their surrounding social audience and provide insight into mechanisms of flock cohesion and relationship formation and maintenance within flocks. (PsycINFO Database Record

Mixed-species flock composition matters: interspecific influences on finding novel food in North American parids

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Audience effects in a group‐living bird: How contact call rate is affected by vegetation and group size and composition

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Consistent individual variation in plant communication: do plants have personalities?

“…Conversely, alarm calls may be benecial to the emitter if they startle or dissuade the predator (Sherman 1985), signal that they are aware of the predator making successful predation unlikely (Hasson 1991), or provide useful information to kin, with whom the emitter shares genes (Maynard Smith 1965). As such, emission rates of animal alarm calls have been found to vary based on the social composition and relatedness of the potential audience (Townsend et al 2002, Coppinger et al 2018Woods et al 2018). Some animal alarm calls are probably epiphenomena in the sense that animals scream or Communicated by Diethart Matthies.…”